This topic has been going around recently, and I thought I’d put my two cents in.
I’m okay with fanfiction. More than okay–I’d encourage it if I had fans.
I understand why some authors wouldn’t be. It feels weird. An intrusion to your most private thoughts and feelings. And if people wrote fanfics on my novels, I probably wouldn’t read them for this very reason.
But I don’t think it’s for me to tell people not to do it.
I get that authors think that readers should be content with whatever material they produce. That the novels, and whatever work they have, should be enough.
The thing is though–and this is just my opinion only–we, as authors, really don’t have any control over the reader’s experience.
We try. God knows, we try really, really hard. But once those words are out there, printed or formatted into an ebook, it’s out of our hands. We cannot change the reader’s experience to suit our own. And if they feel like they have to explore some untapped avenue, some pairing or situation that they wish had happened but didn’t? Well. Not for us to say “No, it can’t be.”
Some authors think this is wish-fulfillment. It’s true–fanfiction is wish-fulfillment. But let’s not kid ourselves: so are our novels.
I‘m a millennial, so I like to use the term headcanon.
Headcanon is what’s real for the reader, and many times this term comes up when the author does something that the reader isn’t content with. It could be a character death, romance, or even something that happens off-screen but isn’t fully explored.
Fanfiction helps the reader cope when they are faced with disappointment with the source material, or sometimes when they simply want more. I read it myself for stuff like video games or anime, though the only book-based fanfiction I may have read involved Watership Down.
It’s not supposed to be an intrusion. Most aren’t written as a big, giant “FUCK YOU” to the original creator. Some are, but most are written because for one reason or another, these characters, this world, became real to the reader, morphing into something that they lived and breathed and want to participate in.
Isn’t that what we want? To draw people into our worlds, have them fall in love with our characters, to make it so real that once they’ve stepped through that portal they want to make it their own? For the author part of the equation to recede into a background, a silent creator now whose work had sprung to life? It’s gone from us at this point. No longer ours to form or shape as we please. The work and reader relationship has begun, and it can exist without us.
And that’s okay. That’s what gives authors immortality, in a way. But we’re not part of it anymore. The book may always be a part of us, but the opposite isn’t true. It’s like having children. In the end, they’ll do whatever the shit they want, with or without us.
I know other authors may disagree, and that’s okay too. We’re fiercely protective over our works, and God knows, I’d be more than willing to sit down and explain every single event, action, reaction, or character decision that occurs in all my novels.
But just as we don’t like it when readers intrude on our experience, then we should also be respectful of their experience. And when they write fanfiction–even if they are using our characters and our world–it is merely a reflection of their experience, too. And I’m sure your other readers will know the difference.
(Interestingly enough, a lot of fanfiction seem to revolve around “vignettes”–short pieces detailing a character’s thoughts over events or things. You can clearly see the fanfic writer’s own attempt at disseminating their own feelings over the subject. It is never a bad thing when you can make your audience feel that strongly. Unless of course it’s intense boredom, but that’s neither here nor there).
